The formation of pumice a sort of stony “froth” made of siliceous glass is characteristic of the Indonesian volcanoes, and is indeed the cause of their explosive eruptions of incomparable force. The phenomenon is quite similar to the “popping” of popcorn. The water-soaked siliceous magma of the submarine volcano (the primeval Krakatoa) built up tremendous pressures under the weight of the crust and the overlying sea water. Eventually, the topping crust which formed the volcanic peak gave, and the eruption occurred, explosively.
Thus released, the overheated water dissolved in the hot magma turned instantly into vapor, literally bursting like popcorn, except that in a worldwide scale. The sea was impelled, in a huge tsunami that was the event mythified as “the Flood from below”. Simultaneously, the ashes and debris were thrown up into the stratosphere, as “soot”. This fly ash eventually fell back to the earth and the sea, choking all life in the region, and causing the enormous quantities of rain, “the Flood from above”. Further away, it settled over the Ice Age glaciers, causing their melting and triggering the end of the Pleistocene, precisely as related above.
Interestingly enough, the Hindus associate this sort of stuff this vitreous “seafroth” with Krishna and Balarama, the archetypes of Hercules and Atlas. Balarama is the alias of the Serpent Shesha, whose name means (in Sanskrit) “residue” and, more exactly, the kind of foam such as ambergris or pumice stone thrown over the beaches by the seas. The whole story is a clever allegory of the explosion of Mt. Atlas, the World s Pillar, ejecting the huge amounts of pumice stone and fly ash that covered the soil and the seas of Atlantis, and choking out all its paradisial forms of life.
The Titans and Atlas in particular were likened to Serpents (or Dragons), and to “weak-legged”, anguipedal, Civilizing Heroes such as Erychthonios, Cadmus, Hercules, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, etc.. All such indeed derive from the Nagas (“Serpent-people”, “Dragons”) of India and Indonesia, as we argue elsewhere.
The Illusory, Chimerical Atlantises As we said above, the Cretan “Atlantis” of certain authorities is an illusion, as are all others outside the two Indies. Nevertheless, the explosion of the Thera volcano closely parallels the one of the Krakatoa of 1883, as some have noted. But it is far too small and far too wrongly sited in relation to the Pillars of Hercules for to be the right time and the right place.
Moreover, Crete lacked the size and the importance that Plato attributes to Atlantis, being puny in comparison to, say, the contemporary civilizations of Egypt, Babylon and Mycenian Greece. And the Theran cataclysm never sunk Crete underseas, or even hampered its existence in any notable way. In fact, the name of Crete (Kriti) means “swept”, rather than “sunken one”, as does the name of Atlantis in the holy tongues of India. So, Crete was recognizedly “swept” by the Theran cataclysm, but not indeed “sunken” by it, as Atlantis was.
The prehistoric explosion of the Krakatoa volcano that sundered open the Strait of Sunda was, by comparison a million times stronger. If the Theran explosion could sweep away the considerable extent of Minoan Crete, we are led to conclude that the one of the Indonesian volcano could well have wiped out an entire continental-sized civilization, and have triggered the chain of events that culminated in the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age.
Equally illusory are the Atlantises of the Bosphorus (Moreau de Jonnés), of Spain (R. Hennig), of Libya (Borchardt), of Benin, in Africa (Leo Frobenius) and the even less likely one of the North Sea (Olaus Rudbeck), the Americas (several authors) and Antactica (idem). Even more impossible are the Atlantises located in sunken islands of continents of the Atlantic Ocean and, particularly, the Sargasso Sea, for they are not even geophysical possibilities.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Donnelly s Atlantis There are no sunken continents at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, as an extensive study of this region has unequivocally shown. What this detailed research disclosed is the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a vast submarine cordillera that divides the Atlantic Ocean at the middle. This feature corresponds to the rift from whence the Tectonic Plates issue, causing the continents to drift away from the spot, at the rate of a few centimeter per year.
Hence, despite the brilliant plea of Ignatius Donnelly, this ridge corresponds not to a sunken continent, but to land that is slowly rising out of the sea bottom.